A week after France’s Senate voted in favour of a ban on face coverings in public, diverse reactions across the Middle East underline that this region cannot be viewed as a monolithic bloc. It was expected that the forbidding of the niqab and burka would elicit angry reactions: there has been some anger, but reactions have not been uniform nor entirely negative.

There is no single view on the veil that dominates in the Middle East, with many countries debating the place of the niqab even more urgently than their European counterparts.